Then there's the technical side of things. Mr. Market has taken a shine to chart reading. Technical analysis has become so popular it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy: So many people do charts, that when they act on the chart signals (buying when the chart looks optimistic, selling when it paints a bearish picture) the extra demand pushes the price in the direction they expected. What the charts are saying now is that the markets are going to be down for the next month or so, during Hirsch's key October election indicator.

The market has bobbled all year, but there's been a pattern to it and the pattern is headed down for the next few weeks. Until March it moved in waves, getting progressively higher. Since then it's moved in a pattern that traders are familiar with and find distressing: lower highs and lower lows. The market keeps moving up and down, but it's gradually sinking. It recovers, but never quite as strong as the time before. The S&P 500 hit its most recent peak Sept. 21 at 1,131. The previous, declining peaks had 1,163 in March, 1,150 in April, 1,146 in June. A look at the peaks and lows also outlines the S&P 500's declining trading "range" -- the difference between the highs and lows.

Traders like to draw lines on their charts to show a trading range. There are now so many people drawing these lines that the lines themselves act like a fence that becomes hard for a stock to break through: They form "resistance" for a stock heading up or "support" for a stock that would otherwise sink. But if the price does manage to break through the lines, watch out; it's likely to surge in whatever direction it's been heading.

There are other indicators chart readers are looking at now, too: All the indexes are below their 200-day moving averages. That's what's known as the "death cross," a sign that gets Mr. Market spooked. The other big technical tools -- stochastics and Moving Average Convergence Divergence -- also give a big thumbs down for the near term.

So how important is this October indicator? Hirsch considers it a perfect indicator, so long as the results for October are not middling. If the market is up 3.3 percent or more in the month of October, the incumbent has never lost. If the market is down by half a percent or more, the incumbent has never won.

There is a question of timing: This wavy, declining chart pattern shows itself in all the major indexes. But while the NASDAQ, S&P 500 and Wilshire all peaked on Sept. 21, the Dow peaked on Sept. 9. That could be key because the charts say the market is likely to dip down and come back up. The Dow is already off 3 percent from its peak. The other indexes have fallen about 2 percent and the charts say the S&P 500 will probably hit "support" at about 1,050 and bounce back. In other words, Democrats should be looking for the market to be flat till October, then slide down, Republicans would rather it dropped now, then bounced back.

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